Brent Berlin and Paul Kay in Basic Color Terms demonstrate exhaustively and empirically, the very simple thesis that anywhere in the world, as a language develops and acquires names for color, the colors always enter in the same order. The most primitive are black and white. Then red. Then either green or yellow.

Alexander Theroux

Categorized in : Order Simple Black And White

September: it was the most beautiful of words, he’d always felt, evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret.

Alexander Theroux

regret flower beautiful

Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?" asked Mrs. Dodypol. "It depends," says I, "how much you used the dictionary before you read it.

Alexander Theroux

dictionary use book

Where there is no style, there is in effect no point of view. There is, essentially, no anger, no conviction, no self. Style is opinion, hung washing, the caliber of a bullet, teething beads.

Alexander Theroux

style self views

There is a terrible blindness in the love that wants only to accommodate. It's not only to do with omissions and half-truths. It implants a lack of being in the speaker and robs the self of an identity without which it is impossible for one to grow close to another.

Alexander Theroux

omission identity self

Adultery is the vice of equivocation.

Alexander Theroux

color law art

There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage.

Alexander Theroux

being-lonely marriage loneliness

Hypocrisy is the essence of snobbery, but all snobbery is about the problem of belonging.

Alexander Theroux

hypocrisy problem essence

Book-publishing is all about politics. Agents, editors, which books will be puffed, which ignored, etc.

Alexander Theroux

agents editors book

One's style holds one, thankfully, at bay from the enemies of it but not from the stupid crucifixions by those who must willfully misunderstand it.

Alexander Theroux

style stupid enemy

Why should a blacksmith put his hands in the fire if he has tongs?

Alexander Theroux

burning fire hands

I thought... their elegance... lies not so much in their clothes as in their bodies, and their bodies have received it, and continue to unceasingly receive it, from their souls, which are just like yours, lovely Simonetta.

Alexander Theroux

clothes soul lying

Nothing is more subtly destructive than a closed circle of artists feeding on one another. Envy grows from insignificant differences between people, not from overwhelming inequalities... it was envy that forced them to emulate each other, not esteem.

Alexander Theroux

circles differences artist

Artists are never complete people. But if it's art that completes them, then what is taken away?

Alexander Theroux

taken people art

Reviewing books is all about coziness. It is all of it a kind of caucus race. Women review women, Jewish writers review and praise Jewish writers, blacks review blacks, etc.

Alexander Theroux

etc race book

Faculty Meetings are held whenever the need to show off is combined with the imperative of accomplishing nothing.

Alexander Theroux

faculty shows needs

Nothing is quite as bad as being without privacy and lonely at the same time.

Alexander Theroux

privacy lonely loneliness

If on a friend’s bookshelf You cannot find Joyce or Sterne Cervantes, Rabelais, or Burton, You are in danger, face the fact, So kick him first or punch him hard And from him hide behind a curtain.

Alexander Theroux

faces facts firsts

A lover is never a completely self-reliant person viewing the world through his own eyes, but a hostage to a certain delusion.

Alexander Theroux

eye self world

I kneel to my Lord because I am such a failure. I pray, I hope, I look to the Gospels.

Alexander Theroux

praying lord looks

The man who has faith in logic is always cuckolded by reality.

Alexander Theroux

have-faith men reality